Life as a Guardian of the Globe fell into a comfortable tedium. Training sessions were a commonality, shared between most of the members at a given time. There were instances where they were busy with errands, meetings, or fighting crime all on their lonesome. For the most part, though, Robot had us running through a pretty tight array of different drills.
For all that I’d been directed by the GDA to problem hotspots around the globe, there was a lot I had to learn about working in a team. It was hard to squash the instinct that I could do it all by myself when I objectively knew that it wasn’t true. And that, despite the fact that I could spin off no small number of clones to accomplish things, it just wasn’t efficient.
My chakra reserves were an ocean, still growing slowly but steadily the more I pushed myself over time. That wasn’t to say that they were truly unfathomable or bottomless, though. Just better than basically any human with chakra could have dreamed of. As insane as it might have seemed to think I didn’t doubt there were situations where I could inevitably run out of chakra.
Which meant that it was in my better interest to be economical about when and where I spent it. For the most part, anyway. Thus, I had to learn when to delegate and when to trust in the people around me to handle whatever emergency had gone to the fore in my absence. There was also more to teamwork than I could have ever imagined, and that the Ōtsutsuki had never quite managed to figure out.
More often than not, the clan only sent out the various members in groupings of two. One main branch member, who would be the beneficiary of any chakra fruit, and the servant branch, who’d have to sacrifice themselves to make it happen. Incursions of numbers beyond that just… didn’t… happen.
At least, the servant branch member I’d taken over hadn’t heard of any occurring in their long, long history.
How to make effective and accurate call-outs over communications, for example, rather than saying things that made sense to me. Creating plans that took into account not just the things I knew I could do but also the capabilities of my peers around me. And don’t get me started on the seemingly endless number of procedures.
There were numbers memorized for basically every kind of emergency service imaginable, whether that be waste management to the CDC. Robot might not have been totally connecting to the younger members of the team with this educational deluge, like Rex, Rae, Kate, and Amanda, but Samson and I were keeping up. Though in Samson’s case, I got the feeling that this was more like a refresher for the man.
As he liked to bring up so often, he was a founding member of the Guardians. Though, I’ll concede that he’d been good about restraining his instinct to try and mention it every other conversation. I wouldn’t say there was a true lack of friction between him and the younger members of the team, but it was certainly lessening as time went on. Sometimes that little progress was all you could ask for.
Either way, things were coming together the best they could as we ran through drills, though we hadn’t actually deployed yet. Situations that required all of the Guardians of the Globe, and not just a handful, were relatively few and far between. We were supposed to be deployed during situations like the Flaxan invasion, attacks on the White House, and other significant threats.
There was a fight with the Lizard League, but it was so brief as to not be worth mentioning. Literally, given the fact that while the rest of the team focused on actually stopping them, I kept the damage to a minimum. Even if a not insignificant part of me was dissatisfied with that notion. How to describe it…
It was like there was a hunger in the pit of my stomach, and not a physical kind of craving. Merely an element I wasn’t sure was being fulfilled, some inhuman instinct that didn’t belong to the man I was before. More so a remnant of the creature that I’d become, some imperative or drive writ large across its genes.
Flowery ways to think about it, yes. For a human mind, however, it was the only way I could get it across. Something was missing from my life, and until I figured out what it was, there’d be this persistent feeling of going through the motions. I just didn’t know how to find out what it was.
Just because I was a big-time superhero now, though, didn’t mean that I wanted to stop helping people. Saving the world was nice and everything, but sometimes you needed to look out for the little guy. Which was what I did my best to do whenever I had the free time to fly around, using my Byakugan to find instances where I could help out.
Sometimes I was stopping a mugging, putting out a house fire, and doing things of that nature. Where I was genuinely saving someone’s life or keeping them safe. It also gave me opportunities to experiment in a relatively safe way, like using earth release to shift the terrain around someone’s feet or stopping blazes with deluges of water. I’d even experimented with lightning release for certain electrical fires to stop the power grid at certain points, though mixing technology and that specific release needed more testing before I was comfortable with doing it more often.
And sometimes the instances in which I intervened were a lot more mundane and far less on the spectrum of something that was life and death.
“Do a fire truck next!”
“No, a skyscraper!”
“Make a dog!”
I raised my hands at the assorted crowd of children in the park, trying to settle them down. “Easy, easy,” I demurred, glancing between all the youthful, excited faces who were surrounding me. “One at a time. I’ll make a fire truck first, alright!”
The black kid who got chosen was beaming, giving me a gummy smile that was missing a few teeth as I focused on ice release. I molded the shape in my mind until I crafted one made out of ice, but ice that wasn’t nearly as cold as it could have been. Even the hard edges had been blunted, so it was a somewhat unwieldy but carryable item for the kid to take into his arms.
He looked at me like I’d handed him all of the secrets of the universe, though. And that was what made this entire experience worth it. It wasn’t even something I’d planned on doing, flying low over the park, before a bunch of families and kids saw me. More of an errant, lazy thought, as I planned on giving a few autographs.
Right until one of them had the bright idea to try and ask me for an ice sculpture. Honestly, I didn’t have any reason to refuse at the time, which was how we got here. Me, slaving away for a bunch of children as I created ice sculptures in the park for them. Most of them would melt by the time they got home, or melted by the end of the day for the larger ones I was creating and setting down.
But for a few moments, something fantastical had entered their lives. That was what made it all worthwhile for me, as I grinned and got started on the next sculpture. No matter the fact of the matter, heroism was about more than just punching bad guys and putting criminals in jail. Doing so certainly was rewarding, don’t get me wrong.
People needed icons, though, to aspire to. That was what superheroes were meant to be in my eyes. Someone that the world could look to and rest easily, knowing that they were looking over them. Looking up to them and their actions, their selflessness, and their humanity in their every interaction with people. It wasn’t a given that I could always live up to that ideal, because at the end of the day, I was only a man.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t try and be a little better each day. So despite the fact that there were likely better uses of my time, I still tried to find times like this to connect with people wherever I went. What was an hour or two for me was a cherished memory of a lifetime for some random kid who got to meet and play with a superhero.
No matter what my actual personal issues were or how performative it might have seemed. All the world was a stage in the end, and we all had to play our parts.
All good things had to come to an end eventually, as I made my soft excuses to leave. Much to the disappointment of the various kids, as they were stewarded away by their parents. Without much fanfare, I took off into the air, offering a few waves and a smile for the assorted crowd, lifting myself to overlook the city of Chicago.
Even without my Byakugan active, the view was incredible. I wasn’t high enough to interfere with any actual aircraft, but still high enough to get a good vista of the entire landscape, as I hovered there, a smile on my face. Though it wasn’t long before I all but felt someone flying toward me with my sensory abilities, and I glanced back at the approaching figure.
It was enough to almost make me freeze before I cooled my initial panic. After all, it wasn’t as if I wanted Omni-Man to notice that there was something wrong or that I was nervous around him. As he approached me properly, this was the first real time I’d gotten an in-depth look at the man for any real length of time.
Up close and personal, I could take in all of the details. Structurally, Omni-Man was much like his son in his likeness to humanity. Biologically, they had pretty much all of the same structures. If there was a key genetic difference, it lay on something that my eyes weren’t suited to pick up. Deeper than the Byakugan could sense, anyway.
“Hello there,” he greeted with the kind of friendly smile that gave nothing away. “Taijitu, right?”
Nothing about him gave away that he was a cold-blooded murderer. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about it, or Nolan wasn’t the sort of man that let those sorts of things hang over his conscience. It was just a little jarring to connect Earth’s greatest hero to the man that Cecil and Damien would have me believe he was.
“That’s me,” I confirmed, smiling gormlessly at the man. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“It’s not every day a new hero sets up shop in my city,” Omni-Man admitted, shrugging softly as we hung in the air. “I figured I’d say hello to the new local Guardian of the Globe.”
A nervous chuckle escaped me as I rubbed the back of my head. “You heard about that?”
He smiled wryly, as if we were both in on a joke. “It’s not every day an alien comes, makes a splash, and finds their way into the premier superhero team on Earth. A bit of a meteoric rise in every sense.”
Looking from the outside in, I could see what he even meant by that. It wasn’t as if there weren’t other, more seasoned superheroes that had also gone up in the initial trials. However, I also implicitly understood what my role in the team was meant to be.
I was the powerhouse, the guy who hit things really, really hard. It was a role that I don’t think anyone else could fill, especially not with my sheer versatility. That wasn’t even arrogance, but just the facts of the matter. Like the mechanized suits that the Flaxans had wielded, there were just opponents that almost nobody on my team would be able to handle.
Maybe Rudy, when he’d finally finished transferring into a clone of my body. But even with all of his intelligence, it would still take years of training before he matched up with what I could do.
“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, I’ll admit,” I freely admitted to the man, keeping myself lazily floating in the face of the wind. “There’s been a lot about this world that’s confusing to me. But the people are kinder than I’d expected.”
That wasn’t to say I had some presumption that the people of earth were somehow saintly, faultless figures that could do no wrong. I knew that at their worst, they could prove just as bad if not worse than any member of the species I now was. A lot of things that were taken for granted here, like the culture around superheroes too, was also something that I was still getting used to.
With all of that taken into account, though, I did quite like this world.
“It’s certainly something that can take a while to get used to,” Omni-Man conceded, with a nostalgic, amused smile on his face. “When I first got here, I was so confused by certain elements of human society, mostly because they resemble Viltrumites so greatly.”
“It’s a bit of a cosmic peculiarity," I admitted. “But I suppose the humanoid body plan has its uses on an evolutionary basis.” In the scheme of a comic book universe, it wasn’t that odd. DC, Marvel, and Wildstorm had their own analogs of exceptionally human-like alien species with heightened abilities in their long, storied history. It wasn’t surprising that this world was no different.
There was probably some deep, ancient connection between humanity and Viltrumites, though it wasn’t something I planned on looking for anytime soon. It felt like a job for someone interested in that kind of deep dive of the ‘lore’ of this world. For me, I’d rather live in the present.
“What do you think of humans?” He asked, sounding genuinely interested. “From one outsider to another.”
“Honestly? In truth, I don't have much of an opinion on humans yet. I find myself enjoying my time here,” I freely admitted to him.
For as much as this reality resembled my own, the differences in culture, reactions to superhuman threats, and history were starkly different. Despite how much this land resembled the America of my past, it was a superficial, skin-deep resemblance at best. Humans were mostly the same, yet simultaneous were capable of feats with training that were incredible in their own right.
That was before going into how my body worked and how much it divorced me from the experience of the common man. While I had the sensory capacity for hot and cold, I hadn’t truly been either since I’d arrived in this world. A million little details that were step by step pulling me away from the man I had been before, and I probably didn’t even realize most of them.
Even so…
I let out a long sigh as I let the original Genji’s memories race through my mind. It wasn’t something I did often, if only because of his distressing; they were from the outside looking in. To him, they were normal. To me… a little more fucked up than just distressing.
“Yet to these people I am practically a demigod. Compared to the position I held as a glorified foot soldier to my own people, I don't in truth know if the way they are doing things is good for humanity as a whole.”
“The only thing I know for sure is that for me, from my perspective, living on Earth is a breath of fresh air.”
Those words were percolating inside of the man for a while longer before he found the right words he wished to say. “I think it was shocking when I found out about all the little inefficiencies in their governments, too,” he admitted. “Things that would never have been accepted on Viltrum were just a matter of course here.”
A thoughtful hum escaped me. “Such as?”
“The corruption for one, and the scandals of misallocation of resources, dereliction of duty, and things of that nature,” the moustached man explained further.
“It’s different in your home?”
There was a much longer pause as Omni-Man crossed his bulky arms, and something wistful entered his eyes. I hesitated to call it nostalgia, because the smile that was on his face had disappeared. Instead, his features firmed into something harder, as he recalled whatever it was that was racing through his mind.
“Viltrum is a place of duty, deep reserves of discipline, and commitment to our people. It’s…harsh, at times,” Omni-Man conceded, as if he wished to explore more on that statement. “But the reality is that crucible is what created our existing society. What made us strong, against all threats, internal and external.”
What an interesting way to put that. I wasn’t sure why I latched onto the last sentence as something to take note of. There was just that it was an itch in the back of my mind, that it was an element of what he said that I needed to recognize. “...I don’t necessarily disagree.”
He glanced sharply toward me, a little bit of surprise coloring his features as I continued to speak. “My people, the Ōtsutsuki, are mighty. Each of us with our own innate gifts, and almost all of us fully willing to give everything for the sake of our goal.”
“Which is?”
“Ascension,” I answered, shooting him a wry grin. “Something reserved for only an admittedly ever smaller population of our people. We divide ourselves into two castes, the main and the branch clans. For the main, life is good. They travel across worlds, harvesting them for the lifeforce of the existing peoples there and draining them dry to get stronger. Closer to godhood, if you believe it.”
It wasn’t hard to understand why that sort of delusion was so widespread amongst my kin. In many respects, after consuming a few chakra fruits, you very much were nearly godlike compared to even the other members of your own species. Seeing everything else as a resource was a dangerous spiral at that point.
Something I had been carefully trying to curate and prune in my own mentality. There were times when I thought of people and places as resources to be exploited, first and foremost. Excising or stopping those trains of reasoning was a constant effort, even with a human memory behind the wheel.
Omni-Man was quiet for a while longer before he spoke up. “And the branch clan? Their lot in life?”
“Ours was to sacrifice and toil on behalf of our betters, an existence that culminates in us ultimately allowing our life to be taken, for the main clan to grow in strength. That too is duty, but not one I imagine most would be willing to follow.”
The original Genji certainly wasn’t. Or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say he didn’t wish to be the one who was making that sacrifice at all.
“You don’t think there’s honor in that as well? To be part of something grander, even if it costs you your life?” Omni-Man offered, questioning but not denouncing my position. Just offering an alternative take on things.
“Maybe,” I conceded, shrugging. “But I don’t think it’s for me. Nor do I think things would work out so well if humanity were forced to be like either of our species.”
Glancing back over at him, I arched a brow his way. “You value duty, strength, and personal discipline as the core tenets of a society, right?”
He nodded. “That’d be a succinct way to put it.”
“The things about human society that I can acknowledge and deride, like the apparent corruption, indecisiveness, and rampant personal weakness, are things that in an ideal world would be excised from their society,” I freely admitted. “However, they are also inherently tied to the allowance for personal vulnerability and freedom that I also very much enjoy, that my own people would never have allowed.”
“Hmm.” There wasn’t any judgement in Omni-Man’s hum. Just the acceptance that the way I saw things and the way he saw things were different. At loggerheads, perhaps, as we approached this situation with two different backgrounds and sets of experiences, looking out at the earth.
Salient points could be argued for both sides being right in their own way. I just knew how I felt about my own arguments and why I pushed for them. Even in my old life, the height of my desire would have been the personal freedom I now hold. Power and options that would have been winnowed down if I lived in the society of the original Genji, or seemingly that of Viltrum.
“Well, I can tell that we both have ventured far away from the purpose of this greeting,” Omni-Man conceded, inclining his head ever so slightly. “Thank you for humoring me during your break.”
A crooked smile came over my face as I glanced back over at the city. “It’s fine. Can’t be on duty all the time.”
“You’d be surprised. Until next time, Taijitu.” With that, he took off at blistering speeds, leaving me alone to wear a more congenial expression, at least until he was out of range of my vision. Then, I could let a frown drift over my face.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little shaken over the conversation. If only because more than anything else, it almost felt like Omni-Man was trying to sound out how I felt about the Earth. Giving him honest answers on the matter was the best that I could do, but the real question was whether or not he bought it. For a guy like him…
I didn’t know if my own words were enough. And what he’d do if I wasn’t on board with whatever the hell he had in mind. It went without saying that all of this cloak-and-dagger skulduggery was something I fiercely hated. But until I was positive, one hundred percent sure that the story Cecil and Damien were giving me, I’d try to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Until it was impossible to do so anymore. For a man who’d saved as many lives over the course of his career on Earth, he deserved that much at least.
The mission started out relatively normally, all things considered. An anonymous but reliable tip from Cecil was enough to make everyone deploy. It wasn’t outright stated, though I felt it was implied, that the new version of the Guardians of the Globe basically jumped at his say-so. Whether or not that was good or bad, or if the original version of the team had been correct to keep the GDA at arm’s length, I didn’t know.
What I did know was the fact that we would be inserting into a possibly volatile situation. It was the type of scenario we shined in.
“You’re first in, Taijitu,” Robot instructed. “Monster Girl, Black Samson, you both flank him once we arrive at the penthouse. Rex, Kate, Rae, tertiary positions to flank and attack from the sides.”
It was a good enough plan, I thought, as the majority of the group rode in one of Robot’s expanded vehicles. I flew alongside, keeping pace with the speedy machine, as everyone heard their marching orders. Flying through Chicago, it wasn’t going to be that long before we actually arrived at our destination.
Though judging by the absolute clusterfuck I was seeing with my eyes, we might want to speed it up. “Invincible is getting absolutely hammered in there, along with some guy covered in stone,” I yelled, pointing to our destination. “We’re going in hot!”
“To your positions! Make us an opening, Taijitu.”
“With pleasure.”
I didn’t even bother to create any kind of fancy jutsu for this. Not when my own physical prowess would do, as I accelerated and merely broke open a hole in the side of the building. One big enough for me to inspect all of the foes laid before us, while my allies leapt inside. Most of them weren’t seemingly all that threatening, if I was being honest.
Some guy made of lava, some dude with a sort of series of tendrils coming out of his abdomen, a big suit of armor, and some other fellow with crackling electricity around his body. Even the two behind the desk didn’t radiate any profound sense of threat to me, at least, any that I could notice, anyway. But there was one figure in the room that gave me pause.
He was huge.
I meant big in the way that like, went beyond the actual bare physicality of it. There was this pressure, this surging wave of vitality, and the other two energy sources that I’d only ever seen on entities like myself and Omni-Man. Easily clearing six feet, with clawed hands and feet, and holding this golden mace, the outfit he wore was as alien as it was ornamental in an odd sort of way.
His face was bestial, like a lion, a long mane of white hair flowing behind him, while two shorter braids framed his face. And when I entered the room, there was a moment when the two of us locked eyes, when I saw him and he saw me, and there was a flicker of understanding between us.
On the ground nearby was Invincible, looking as if someone had beaten the tar out of him. As well as some Black guy partially covered in some kind of broken stone armor. Neither of them looked like they’d taken this fight well, and judging by the ruins of the penthouse around them, they’d been trying to give as good as they’d gotten.
For as much as that would help, anyway.
Checking his pulse, Samson murmured to Invincible. “We’ll take it from here, kid,” he reassured him, helping him up slowly.
I wasn’t paying attention to them, though. All of my attention was on the man, the monster, that my instincts were screaming at me to pay attention to. “... Robot,” I spoke. “I’m about to be very preoccupied. Apologies in advance.”
He turned to face me in confusion. “Taijitu, what are you talking abou—"
It wasn’t something I was going to be able to answer, with my attention on the opponent before me. One moment I was there, and the next I was reinforcing my body with as much chakra as possible, a blur through the air as I was slamming into the man. It was a level of force that would have killed most people on this planet that I’d willingly restrained myself from using before.
Instead of turning into chunky salsa or a red smear across my robes, the leonine man lived. Grappled as he was by the shoulders, he even had the speed and strength to wrap an arm around my torso, making me suddenly and painfully aware of his unyielding strength. Power that might have eclipsed my own in raw, physical potency, as that molten gaze found my own, lips peeling back to expose a grin of bared fangs.
Then two words escaped him, barely loud enough for me to hear them over the rushing of the wind as we soared out over the city. “Maybe you’ll do.”
So far, I’d had the singular pleasure to never fight someone of my own tier of might on this planet. There were certainly instances where some people came close to genuinely being able to hurt me, to be clear. Monster Girl’s transformed state, or the Flaxan mechanized suits, in particular, were nearing enough raw kinetic force to be faintly distressing. Even if they lacked in some other ways to capitalize on that potential.
I’d gotten complacent, really, to the fact that I’d always be the most dangerous thing in the room. Right until the monster in front of me slammed his head against my own, and every clever thought of superiority left me at the same time. Forget about seeing stars; for a brief moment I saw moon mommy Kaguya herself as I reeled back from the sheer force of it. Blood splattered forth from a nose that was almost positively broken, and the grip I held on my foe was loosened for a fraction of a second.
Long enough for him to just use those prodigious muscles of his to my detriment.
Twisting in the air, he shifted and swung his mace downward into my chest. The impact rattled me even further, as I rocketed toward the ground in a pale blur, as my Byakugan’s expanded vision gave me a painfully expansive view of precisely how badly I was getting my ass beaten. My own arrogance, my own pride and presumption of my own strength, had gotten me in this situation, as I felt the promise of a fresh bruise bloom across my chest right before I hit the street below.
If there was a small blessing, it was that the street was mostly empty. The key word being mostly, as I could barely wrangle my own flight to soften the landing. Not enough to stop the red SUV that I impacted from going rolling, or to stop myself before I slammed through the middle of a white trailer being pulled by a big rig.
The only thing that softened the landing was my own speed, as I skidded along the street, dragging my fist into the concrete while I poured chakra into my own flight capabilities in the opposite direction. Looking over the scene that I’d been blown through, it was…
Well, the Flaxans had done worse, which wasn’t saying much. The street hadn’t been much occupied when I’d been thrown into it, and while it was mostly upturned and ruined, I hadn’t been knocked away hard enough to create a sonic boom to break the glass windows. Small blessings.
All of this, all of the stunned people that I was seeing in my radius, the broken and battered bodies, had happened in a matter of seconds. It was impossible for my mind not to drift back to the conversation I’d had with Omni-Man, not that long before, about the weakness and frailty of humanity. I was meant to protect them from this, and frankly, I hadn’t done a good job.
But that simmering pool of anger and self-loathing could come later. My foe was slamming into the ground a distance away, on the other end of the downtown thoroughfare. He walked forward, swinging his mace almost lackadaisically, a big, cheesing smile on his face, as if this was just a walk in the park.
“I was fearful that Earth lacked sufficient warriors, given all that I’d been told of it. To think, someone of your peculiar constitution had been hiding here.” A sigh escaped him before he shrugged. “It’s no matter. We’ll have enough time to test what you can do in full.”
As much as I wanted to respond to this madman, the communication channel I was on was filled with questions. Queries, and the sound of violence from whatever fight the rest of the Guardians were in. Something I’d have to hope they could manage on their own, since I definitely wasn’t going to be any help in trying to deal with the villains.
I had my own fish to fry. Cat? Judging by the luscious, red blood spilling down my lips, it wasn’t out of the question that I had whatever passed for a concussion for my species.
“Taijitu? What is your condition, report in, Taijitu!”
There was genuine, heady panic in Robot’s voice as he tried to get my attention, which was a genuinely touching thing to hear. It meant that he cared enough to at least let his typical mission decorum break. However, I couldn’t spare more than a moment to touch my communicator as I coughed, rubbing where my opponent had struck me.
“You’re going to need to handle the rest of the mission without me,” I croaked out, having to rapidly suck in air to properly speak. “So, very nicely, cut the chatter and let me fight.”
“... Understood. We’ll handle things here.”
One problem I didn’t have to worry about. All I could do was just hope that things would be brought to a suitable close and that I wouldn’t have to be concerned about them surviving the fight. I was expecting that I’d have my hands full with this guy.
Letting the communications fall away into the background, I fixed the creature with all of my attention as he approached me. Not fast, but with an intent, almost leisurely stroll. “Is there any way I can convince you to not fight? This isn’t how things are done on this planet, you know.”
“I could be convinced to move it somewhere else,” the alien entity admitted with a shrug, glancing around at the destruction he’d caused dispassionately. “There’s no sport in crushing insects.”
That…was actually a relief. Having to fight while also spending my chakra to create clones to move people out of the way would have gotten tiresome. There were almost ten million people in the Chicago metropolitan area, and for a fight like this, I had an inkling of an idea that I’d be putting all of them in danger just by throwing around my strongest powers.
“... Surprisingly sensible of you.”
“I’d rather fight you at your best. Not when you’re obviously distracted by all of these weaklings.”
Well. Here I was, thinking that I was dealing with a somewhat rational man. However, it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I was fighting a battle junkie. The kind of person who was in it for the thrill, rather than any cause or purpose.
Whatever my own feelings were on this fight, they were being studiously ignored. Even as I felt myself begin to grow antsy in my own fashion. Still, I had the opportunity to move the fight somewhere else, and I intended to take it. Stepping closer, I waved my hand and created a matte black portal in space. “After you.”
He studied it dubiously, and rightfully so. “What is this?”
“A means of egress. If it’ll make you feel better, we can both go in at the same time,” I assured him. “I’ll even hold your hand.”
Escaping him was a bark of laughter as he shook his head. “Side by side will do. Let us go, so the glorious combat can begin.”
It was a level of trust I wasn’t sure I would have given my enemy, but then again, he’d be in arms reach the entire time. If it was an option, I might have just teleported him to the moon or the sun, but my range wasn’t that good yet. So I’d have to settle for taking us somewhere else, as we both stepped through the portal and into a new domain for our fight.
There were certain fundamental laws of jutsu that were universal. Elemental release, especially, had one truism, and that was it was easier to manipulate what was already around you than to create something new. It was the reason why I’d teleported us here, to the Arctic Circle, the closest place where I could find vast quantities of ice.
For the level of hyōton I was about to inflict on this world as we stood on a glacier, that felt appropriate.
“You’ve taken us from the urban center, it seems,” the primal warrior commented, as we walked in a circle, each looking for an opening in the other’s guard. “Far more desolate environs, but suitably barren.”
"There are too many people around for me to cut loose,” I admitted. “I’d rather not have any further civilian casualties.”
A low, throaty chuckle escaped him as he shook his head at my words. “Even now you deny yourself your purpose, covering it in excuses.”
“... What?”
“You’re smiling,” came the amused answer of the man, as a feral delight flickered in his predatory gaze. “Did you know that?”
A hand came up to my lips, and true enough, I was smiling. Cheesing for the camera, as it were, broad and beaming. “Huh. Would you look at that…”
“There’s no one here to burden you with troublesome rules or regulations, my friend. You can be as you were truly meant to be. Let loose, as it were, for our clash,” the creature continued, sweeping a massive, muscular arm over the vast, desolate expanse they were walking across. “Don’t you feel it? The rush of blood in your veins, telling you to fight? To win, or lose, and enjoy the thrill…?”
I didn’t say anything, because as much as I hated to admit it, the man was right. My blood was roaring in my head; I was hurt in ways I’d never been before and in the most danger I’d been in since I’d been given this new shot at life. However, I was also feeling the most excited I’d felt in weeks. Genuinely, wholeheartedly thrilled, as I felt my own ardor rising in the wake of our brief exchanges.
When was the last time I’d ever been pushed like this before? Never truly pushed to the brink physically, mentally, in terms of skill, or in actual battle intelligence. I’d been trying to mostly act like a human, and for the most part I was succeeding. But the Ōtsutsuki, for all of their seeming relation to humanity, were not human.
There were genetic imperatives and drives that I’d never experienced because I’d never run into the stimulus to make them come to the surface. The will to dominate, to fight, to overcome, to evolve, and everything that made them prodigious wielders of all things chakra. All of the elements that were abominable when taken to their horrific extremes.
I’d been denying a part of myself my purpose, and I didn’t even realize it until this moment.
It was enough to make me laugh, deep and from the gut, as I put my hands on my hips and threw my head back. The laughter that came out of me was earnest, as I let it all out, and my opponent was honorable enough in his own way to let me work it out. At least until I stopped, wiped my eyes from the tear that’d been threatening to spill, and smiled at him.
“Thank you, genuinely. I didn’t know I needed it spelled out to me like that.”
“True warriors often cannot properly acknowledge their desires,” he admitted. “It took me a long time until I realized who and what I really was when I stopped dressing it up in the skin of justification and purpose.”
I hummed. “What did you find then?”
“That there doesn’t need to be a purpose beyond the fight. Sometimes, the conflict in and of itself is purpose enough. A clashing of warriors, spilling their lifeblood, and seeing who will come out on top.”
A part of me resonated with that, even if I didn’t think I entirely believed it. It wasn’t my entire truth and didn’t consume me with some profane revelation like it had with this guy. But it was close enough for government work.
“I’m Genji. Genji Ōtsutsuki.”
The lion man paused. “Thokk. But most know me as the Battle Beast these days.”
"Well, Thokk, I’d apologize for what I’m about to do to you, but I imagine you’re just as eager for this as I am.”
He grinned, all canines and sharp teeth, practically vibrating the will for violence made manifest. “No apologies are needed,” Thokk reassured him. “I’m in this… how do some say it these days? Ah, yes. I’m in it for the love of the game.”
Couldn’t fault the man.
My body was battered, bones aching, and hurt in ways that I could never recall being wounded like before. But I was alive, and it was enough to make my heart race and the smile on my face prove all the more genuine. “Then I suppose I’ll have to do my best to live up to your expectations.”
Inside of me, I reached for the cold. The blizzard that was unbidden in my veins, that I always had to be careful about never fully unleashing. The Yuki had been a clan that presumably pushed it as far as their human biology allowed for, which had been impressive. However, the important piece of that was the part where I mentioned as far as their human biology allowed for.
Ever since I’d arrived in this new world of mine, I’d been holding back. It was for obvious reasons, mind you, since even a restrained member of my race was capable of incredible amounts of collateral damage. Trying to be a superhero meant trying to hold back from those impulses to just deliver massive amounts of AOE damage to whatever was irritating me at a given moment.
But here, far away from anyone who might be hurt, besides the wildlife, that was a different story. After so long of living in a world of cardboard, it was going to be all I could do to cut loose. Just like that old earworm, I let it go and allowed the blizzard that always rested inside of me to be unleashed onto the world.
One moment the sky was cloudy, and the next there was nothing but a massive, forming blizzard that began to take shape in the sky above us. When I exhaled, cold frost came out of my mouth, while ice crept out from my feet. First in a small layer, and then rippling waves as a barrage of ice spikes began to erupt from the ground, aiming toward Thokk to skewer him.
He was every bit the warrior I thought he was, though.
Already moving the moment that I’d started my shinjutsu, rushing toward me as his mace swept out and shattered the ice that was coming his way. Not just one, or twice, but a flurry of blows that blurred as he leapt, vaulting one to slide down another truck-sized spike with a nimbleness that surprised me. I was faster, perhaps, but he had more short-range explosive movement.
Good to know, as his mace spun up for another swing and slammed into me. Or rather, into the ice clone that I’d left in my place, having swapped positions via the kawamiri right before he’d landed the strike. It broke completely and entirely, but that was fine. The sole job I needed it to do was leave me an opening for my own strike.
Coming out from under the glacier beneath him, the ice parted like a liquid wave before me as I surged up. One moment Thokk was confused, and the next he had the heightened senses to pick up where I was coming from, head flicking downward to see me through the crystal-clear glacier. Not quick enough to stop himself from getting hit with an absolutely brutal uppercut, though.
I put as much chakra reinforcement as I’d dared into the strike, enough to break through most lesser men. But Battle Beast, if nothing else, was not a lesser by any stretch of the imagination. Even as I felt my fist ache from the blow and saw him spinning up into the sky, I knew it wouldn’t be enough to take him down. It was why I was flying right after the alien.
Combat in three-dimensional space had a much different flavor to fighting when you were on the ground. It wasn’t as if you didn’t have to worry about people coming from behind you, but coming from below or above was a much different story. For someone like Battle Beast, who didn’t seem to have any real flight capabilities, I was intending on taking advantage of that capability.
Into the air we went as I was a blur of movement, strikes punching forth into any sensitive points I could spot along Thokk’s body. Forget about trying to be delicate or using some version of the Gentle Fist; I was hitting as hard as I could. Mostly because just from the sheer resistance, I knew his flesh could take it.
Hell, even the bloody grin he gave me was evidence enough of that, as he looked down at me with nothing but pure, gleeful delight. “OUTSTANDING!”
Maybe that should have been my first warning that he was humoring me. Or at least letting me get in some good hits, as my next punch was caught. And then, under the hydraulic press of his massive, clawed hand, the bones in my left hand were being crushed underneath his grip.
“FUCK!” I roared, pain blurring my vision and slowing me down, right before I found myself getting a faceful of mace once again. However, this time Thokk wasn’t letting me get out of his reach. Using the grip he had on my hand, the man bludgeoned me, over and over again, in the face, in the shoulders, strikes that should have left anyone else on the Guardians as little more than red mist.
I could take it, though, no matter the way I wished I couldn’t. As we fell back down toward the ice, hurtling, a primal snarl of delight escaped him. “YES, haha, YES!”
We hit the ice and then went through it.
Deeper and deeper into the cold, crystalline depths of the glacier that we were standing on. Being surrounded by it was what slowed him down enough for me to open my mouth and project a small, hardened icicle from it, directed straight at his face. Whether or not he was in it for the love of the game, as he said, Thokk wasn’t a fool.
He disengaged, allowing me to break away, parting the ice beneath me as I moved to try and gain some distance. My left hand was…not in the best of shape, but I could fight through the pain. However, the typical tactic of just overpowering him wasn’t going to work. While I was objectively faster than Thokk, the problem was that I just wasn’t stronger.
Add in the fact that his weapon was built of something tough enough to not break when used with his full might, and you could see the issue here. There was one thing I did have in my favor, though. I was an Ōtsutsuki, and that meant one thing, and one thing only. When we ran into an insurmountable problem, we fell back on our favorite solution to all of our conundrums.
Throw immense amounts of chakra at it until it either died or went away.
Time to be a shinjutsu hyōton merchant.
We both came to the surface of the glacier as the storm around us raged, a fierce snowstorm that would have made visibility poor for most people. Yet between my eyes and whatever superhuman senses that Battle Beast possessed, we could still make each other out just fine.
“Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals,” I murmured, more for myself than anything else, as the jutsu took shape. If I was going to go out with a bang, goddamn, I might as well aura farm while I did it.
Saying it was even remotely on the same scale as the one that Haku had unleashed would have been insulting. Haku was a prodigy with hyōton, to be sure, basically able to cobble together so many techniques just from pure skill and instinct. His was big enough to track a couple of well-trained children in a spacious sort of prison. It was respectable, with what his chakra reserves were capable of.
I was built different. When the mirrors came into shape around Thokk, they were nearer to half a kilometer in the sheer amount of land that was covered. Countless glistening surfaces and planes that all had my reflection in them, as Thokk whirled around, eyes darting between them all.
Granted, it wasn’t so much my reflection as the fact that I was moving between them all nigh instantaneously. It gave the impression that I was in all of them, when in reality I was only in one at a time. You could theoretically pick me out of a specific mirror, but what were the chances of that?
He didn’t get a chance to even try, though, as I began to launch the thinnest, molecular sharp spines of rimefrost that I could manage at him. From where? Literally every angle that I could manage, as they launched toward Thokk at supersonic speeds. Only chakra and my will kept them intact through the velocity they were going, rather than shattering apart into glittering mist.
I should have expected a man who was literally titled the Battle Beast not to be put down by such paltry threats.
When he moved, it was with a speed that I hadn’t thought him capable of. There and then I was made painfully aware that he might have been sandbagging a little or not showing his hand to ensure the fight went on for longer. His mace whipped out, shattering projectiles left, right, up, and all around, as he twisted with a feline grace that didn’t feel like it fit his bulky form.
Which wasn’t to say he wasn’t getting hit in the process. Death by a thousand cuts was my plan, as his flesh and fur were sliced here and there, red blood splattering to the frosty ground. I was hoping to bank on the fact that I would probably have more chakra than he had stamina. It wasn’t even a bad plan, really, if it wasn’t for one key, crucial fact.
He kept speeding up.
It was as if the more he was hurt, the more excited he became, more feral, a gleam of delight entering his eyes unlike anything I’d ever seen. I thought I was cooked when it came to this newfound battle tendency, but apparently I was beaten out by albino Simba over here. The guy was in it to win it, and he was starting to grow increasingly capable of blocking my shots.
More worryingly than that, and it might have outright been just my own paranoia talking, but I was pretty sure he was starting to track my real position through the mirrors. How, why, and when I didn’t fucking know, but his eyes were getting locked onto my real position with an increasingly worrying frequency. Still, the prevailing feeling in me was that things would be fine if I just kept on.
Until he moved, dropping nearly to all fours and heading toward one of the mirrors. Directly at my position, as a surge of panic filled me, and I changed position. Then he did the same, turning on a dime, rampant muscle power rendering him a blur as he rocketed toward me. And I got to see how quickly he really was, as the distance between Thokk and I became more of a suggestion.
Our bastardized game of tag was terrifying for one party, as I was beginning to come to an understanding that the man in front of me was even more inhuman than I was. Atavistic and instinctive, having thrown away every thought that didn’t have to do with violence and the thrill of battle. My prior enjoyment, deep in my gut, began to curdle into something starker, as he closed in on the mirror that I was hiding in.
Fear.
I’d never wondered what Haku felt when Naruto managed to beat him out of one of the mirrors he’d been hiding in. It was such an iconic, bullshit scene from the original run of the anime that you mostly focused on the hype moments and not the complete and utter dread that poor Haku must have felt as Naruto came at him with fangs bared. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to wonder what it was like anymore.
Because it was happening to me. One moment I was dodging and the next I was being palmed out of the mirror I was in, the demonic mirrors shattering all at once as Thokk’s clawed grip squeezed around my skull and threw me half a mile in seconds. The pain was lingering as I righted myself, and my opponent closed the distance between us steadily.
If he was actually close to being finished in the fight, I genuinely couldn’t tell. Which meant that my initial strategies of outlasting him wouldn’t be viable, nor would fighting him on pure technique. That left throwing enormous amounts of power at the Battle Beast. Which worked for me.
“Impressive prowess, my friend,” Thokk snarled, a singular pleasure just oozing from his every word. “But you can’t run forever.”
“I’m not running anymore,” I admitted, spreading my arms open wide and swallowing the instinct to wince at the mangled mess my left hand had become. “We’ll have it out, right here and now.”
“Truly?”
“No tricks,” I lied, a broad smile on my face. “Unless you’re doubting my word as a warrior?”
For all that I would respect Battle Beast for showing me a side of myself that I hadn’t been aware of, that didn’t mean I was going to just treat the man as an unequivocal equal or fair. I respected him; I didn’t actually like him. He was dismissive of the people I sought to protect and was enough of a battle junkie to consider them secondary thoughts at best. Lying to him was, at worst, a middling sin and at best a moral imperative to protect the world.
After all was said and done, I’d still sleep like a baby.
I could see that he squinted my way, as if trying to discern the truth of my words. Before a delighted look came over his face. “No. I can hear the pounding of your heart, matching with mine. We shall, as you say, have it out.”
“Good,” I smiled. “Try to keep up.” And please, please don’t notice the massive amounts of chakra I was pumping into the environment. No one had yet, but that wasn’t an excuse to be cocky about it.
The two of us stood there, looking at each other for a few seconds, as nothing more could be said. Almost as if there was an agreement made, we both moved at the same time. Between blinks, we met with a calamitous, concussive wave of force, my fist against his mace. It exploded out, pure kinetic energy from the raw, dynamic potential contained within our superhuman bodies.
After that… it was nothing but the rush of blows.
I stepped back, sliding under a swing, only to deliver a left and right jab to his stomach. Then I was forced to block as Thokk lifted up a powerful leg and performed a sideways kick to my hip, leaving me skidding across the icy surface of the glacier. Wincing, I had to perform a step to the side to avoid being sliced by his claws and properly retaliate.
As much as I would have liked to just fly and bombard him with jutsu all day long, it was a slow expenditure of chakra that wouldn’t have dealt a decisive blow. So here I was, reinforcing my body to the minimum point of being able to take these hits and dole them out. It was a pure slugfest, my taijutsu against his own eclectic combat style.
Minutes passed by as we hurt each other.
New wounds sprouted across my body, in the shape of raking claws that tore my flesh. From brutal swings of Thokk’s mace, as he bludgeoned me whenever he managed to feint or come at an oblique angle. That didn’t mean I wasn’t trying to give as well as I got, though, when it came down to the fight.
For all that the Hyūga had learned all sorts of things about the Byakugan, there were some powers of it they never unlocked with any real regularity. Something that would make me sound arrogant, admittedly, yet was still true. As the martial contest continued, I felt something about my eyes begin to change.
Where I was struggling to keep up with his movements before, my body was beginning to react faster. No, that wasn’t the right way to put it. More like that, I kept getting these flashes, like I knew what he was going to do before he actually did it. Preternatural instinct that happened every so often, weaving some sort of predictive analysis through the chaos of Thokk’s fighting style.
Brutal as it might have been, there was a method to his madness. Made all the stranger when I started to see hues of riotous color manifesting around his mind. Red, orange, and a light pink, which seemed to be downright suffusing his mind. Frankly, I didn’t have the faintest clue what I was seeing and didn’t much care for it at the time.
All that mattered was how it was making me a better fighter and capable of taking fewer hits while doling out more to Battle Beast. Pinpoint accurate strikes that broke bones under my blows or threatened to rupture muscle and sinew. Hair-thin dodges that left him open for more punishment, letting that instinct for battle that I’d never really allowed to rise to the surface run free, rather than be squashed down.
Though, at the end of the day, all of this was just part of my plan to lull him into a false sense of security.
I didn’t have any special eyes that had evolved past the normal Byakugan, no matter what this fight was doing to my existing capabilities. That meant there were just certain forms of shinjutsu that I didn’t possess, flat-out. Disappointing, but the reality of the situation. It didn’t mean that I had none, especially when combined with my singularly prodigious ice release.
All the while this slugfest had been going on, I was molding chakra. Using as much as I could that wasn’t going toward reinforcing my body to manipulate the ice around us. Preparing it for one final, calamitous assault, as I poured the ocean of power toward the task. For the first time in my new life, I wasn’t looking at this problem like a superhero or an Ōtsutsuki. This trap was a very shinobi-esque maneuver.
It almost didn’t catch him, too, as something gave me away. Maybe it was his own innately superior hearing, picking up the cracking of the ice beneath us. Or maybe he just had developed a keen battle intelligence over the years that had culminated in an almost preternatural instinct for picking out things that seemed awry.
Whatever it was, Thokk tried to break away, but I didn’t intend on giving him the opportunity. Not when my trap was ready to be sprung.
The ice that came from below us was different than the natural stuff that had existed before. Mostly because I’d infused it with no small amount of chakra, in a very similar process to the one that’d created the core of my puppets. Unlike with that time, it wasn’t meant to be designed for the purpose of holding and storing chakra, though.
All of it was built for power and durability, not to pierce or even crush. To contain, as it soared around the Battle Beast and began to encapsulate him. If you didn’t have the capability to create your own leverage, like I did, then you needed room to do so. Even an inch, a centimeter, or anything to actually get the motion started.
So I didn’t intend on leaving him any. Even as he battered and struggled, trying to chip away at the ice, it came from every direction. Crawling along his legs, then his waist, until it sealed him totally at the head. He bashed away some of it, but the binding, the sealing, was too good, as I managed to contain him.
At this point all of my concentration was on this, as I lifted up my hands, teeth grit as I focused on the task at hand. Making the makeshift containment as hard as I could, harder than any formation of frost could have naturally occurred. All of the crystalline networks and structures that made up the ice were reinforced into patterns that did not exist anywhere in the world.
Right before he was entirely encompassed, I saw his burning eyes staring at me with the faintest sense of betrayal. And I allowed myself to feel some kind of kinship and sympathy for the man before I squashed the feeling and let the technique come to a natural conclusion. As he was consumed by my ice burial, life signs turned fainter, though not entirely dead with each passing minute.
Then there was nothing on the glacier except the sound of my habitual panting as I stared at the ice-covered form of my enemy. Pain from the countless wounds that covered my body, as I bled onto the ground, my robes a wreck in every sense of the word. It felt like I really was going to be looking into Art Rosenbaum for a new costume at this rate.
More concerning was when I turned my attention to the former sea of chakra inside of me and balked at what I found.
I wasn’t empty, but the fact that I could feel that my reserves had plummeted this much was shocking to me. Then again, it wasn’t as if I were limitless in terms of what I could produce. Despite how it seemed, my people did run out of chakra eventually. It was difficult to make it happen, and I’d probably be back to my peak in a few days…
… But this was probably the weakest I’d ever been. Maybe ever will be, since I was almost certainly going to cut back on the nerdy projects in the coming future. Not that creating puppets or helping my teammates with their own issues wasn’t fulfilling and rewarding. It just wouldn’t matter if, in the future, I ran into a threat like this again.
Which meant it was time to start hitting the gym. Or at least trying to figure out how to increase my strength.
What did have me perk up was a familiar signature, racing toward me at high speeds. I glanced up and looked over at the familiar, hovering sight of Omni-Man as he began to slow down, overlooking the ruined expanse of the battleground. And then his eyes found me; I had to fight off my every instinct to freeze or flee.
Up until this moment, I’d been willing to give Omni-Man some credit. But with that last fight, my Byakugan had been pushed to their limit, and that strange impulse that came with it hadn’t faded. For the briefest of moments, as he hovered there watching me, I felt the feeling of a threat creeping up my back.
It didn’t last very long at all. However, having fought Thokk, that sensation of killing intent was impossible to miss. No matter how you wanted to dress it up, whatever motivations you wanted to call it, I was pretty sure that Omni-Man had just thought about killing me.
As for what kept him back… I didn’t know. Wariness? An unwillingness to show his hand this early? I didn’t know, and frankly, I didn't care, as all of the hairs on my body rose with that realization. All I understood implicitly was that Damien and Cecil were correct, which was a rather sobering thing to have wash over you when you were already this battered.
Because right now I was fairly sure he was supremely capable of actually killing me if we came to blows. It was for whatever reason that he was holding back, not that I was looking a gift horse in the mouth. My only hope, with how precipitously my chakra reserves had been depleted, was flight if it came down to it.
“Is he dead?” The man asked, glancing over at the frozen body of Thokk, encased in a block of ice that was supernaturally thickened and hardened in equal measure.
I shook my head, hovering a ways apart, as I focused my Byakugan on my former opponent. “No. His vitals are in a state of suspended animation. Cryogenically frozen, essentially.”
It was a last-minute usage of hyōton that I hadn’t even been sure would work and had no small amount of chakra poured into the jutsu. A technique that was grossly inefficient, and to be frank, one I would probably be workshopping a bit in the future. Superheroes didn’t kill (supposedly), and a way to lock down hard targets like this without killing them would be useful.
“I’m a touch too battered to care what happens to the guy from this point on,” I admitted, hopeful that the frozen state would last for a while longer. “I’ll leave it to Cecil to figure out what to do with him.”
“Sensible,” Omni-Man agreed, at least verbally. I’m not sure if he actually felt that way, though, judging by the glance he gave to the frozen Battle Beast. “Though I’m not sure if I’d be able to hold back enough to keep from slaying them.”
“What’s power good for if I can’t hold back?” I shot back, a hint of heat in my voice. “What’s done is done. We’ll just have to deal with it as we will.”
A frown creased Omni-Man’s lips as he lifted off, not saying anything but obviously seeing that his help wasn’t needed here. Moving to grab the massive Lion-sicle and feeling my chakra ebb down even further, I did the same. It was time to leave, and frankly, I’d had enough of the Arctic Circle for a while.
Nothing else to do but a flight back to the GDA, and no small convalescence in my immediate future. That, and the arbiter of what exactly I was going to do about Omni-Man in the future. Or if he was actually even going to wait for me to heal up properly before actually following through on what he’d only thought about before.
Ugh. Why couldn’t this earth just have a simple, straightforwardly good Superman analog?
Author’s Notes
This chapter is a real behemoth. I’ve expanded the original fight with Battle Beast a bit too, in order to capture the scale of the conflict, but also the desperation Genji has in fighting someone he knows without a shadow of a doubt he can’t beat. I hope I’ve managed to handle that well. Also went back and updated the original advance posts with the new version.
Additionally, if you would like to read ahead, you can find up to ten chapters ahead via the linktree in my profile. For the time being, all adult content like future smut in anything I write, will be on , though in due time I'll likely try to get the processing and authentication through on to be able to post it there as well. So be mindful of where you're supporting me.